Low Tide at Port Maitland Wharf
Wharves
The tide range here in Port Maitland is only about 5 meters or about 15 feet. I say “only”, because we are located at the very mouth of the Bay of Fundy, and up at the top end of the Bay, some 200 km north of here, the tide range is over 16 meters or 52 or so feet!
Still, our tide means that while at high tide the waves are just below the top of the wharf here in the village, at low tide there is no water on much of the north side. While walking along the beach this week, my wife and I were intrigued to see the seaweed and rock formations the outgoing tide had exposed, and I was playing with my camera, when I noticed the old bolts and ironworks along the base of the wooden part of the wharf.
When I was a kid, we used to have a lot of fun fishing off the wharf at high tide and we used to get mackerel, flounder, pollock and cod among other things, and at low tide you could flip up the seaweed and sometimes see lobster and crabs hiding from the sun and awaiting the return of the tide.
The fun this day was our dog Finnegan playing in the tide pools, with no fish seen – but there was still a lot to photograph and think about as we looked at the “bottom of the sea”.
